


I loved you with a fire red, now it's turning blue

by LieutenantIvant



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, beautiful tragic disaster lesbians, details from Doctor Aphra #33 and #36, of course you realise this means ANGST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 00:35:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21027347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantIvant/pseuds/LieutenantIvant
Summary: Set during Doctor Aphra #33. Finding out you didn't murder your lover in a crime of passion should be cause for relief. But when said lover is the notoriously selfish stealer of ancient weapons (and hearts) Doctor Chelli Aphra, and the reason you believed it in the first place, relief is the furthest emotion from your mind, as Captain Magna Tolvan discovers.





	I loved you with a fire red, now it's turning blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/gifts).

Captain Magna Tolvan prided herself on her unflappability. She was, after all, a former Imperial officer. She'd learned her trade in a military academy that ruthlessly sought to stamp out weakness or softness of any form in its cadets, and learned it so well she had faced down her own execution for incompetence with only a contemptuous sneer for the scruffiness of those sent to terminate her.   
  
An execution that she'd been condemned to thanks to the actions of one Doctor Chelli Aphra, a weakness no amount of Imperial Academy training could have prepared her for. But one she'd still believed she had well in hand, even as the cunning criminal slipped further and further under her skin with each encounter, until she'd finally thrown the rulebook she'd followed so rigidly out the airlock and, thinking they were going to die any second, passionately kissed the not-so-good doctor.  
  
But surely it was not unreasonable to expect even the most stoic and hardened soldier to be utterly discombobulated at seeing a lover they literally remembered murdering, had suffered repeated nightmares about murdering, had grieved over murdering - standing right in front of them, very much _not_ murdered.  
  
And judging from the look on Chelli Aphra's face, Tolvan's appearance had been only slightly less of a shock.  
  
"Sir...?" 

30 seconds and a stun blast later, Chelli Aphra had fallen to the ground unconscious and Tolvan was ordering her team to carry her onto the Rebel ship, before stalking away.

"You don't see reunions like this on a holodrama," a wide-eyed Sister Six muttered to a stunned Vulaada under her breath as she threw Aphra’s limp form over her shoulder.  


* * *

Tolvan wasn’t one for defying orders, and such was Aphra’s notoriety that she’d been ordered to be kept unconscious in the ship’s brig until she’d been safely delivered to the base, while the girl who’d been with her when she was captured had been given more comfortable quarters. But the churning maelstrom of emotions Tolvan felt at seeing Aphra again were strong enough to override even her ferocious dedication to duty. She needed answers, she needed to know if any of it had…she didn’t know what she needed. She felt like a droid whose circuits had been overloaded; she’d spent so long as an emotionless automaton that she’d struggled with even her first feelings for Aphra, and now…well, total meltdown had ensued. 

She doubled back down to the brig on the pretence of ensuring everything was in order, and, quickly looking around to make sure no one had followed her, touched the pad to unlock Aphra’s cell. The doctor had been laid out on a small pallet that passed for a bed, with her loose black hair falling over the edge, her head lolling to one side. Shutting the door, Tolvan looked at her almost fondly for a brief moment, remembering the time she’d shared a sleeping space with the woman on the bed. Shaking herself back to the present, she rolled her sleeve up to reveal the electro-tattoos that were twin to Aphra’s, which she’d got on another occasion where she’d stupidly tried to help her. Determined to push the previous occasions on which she’d touched Aphra from her mind, she pressed their tattoos together.

The resultant jolt of electricity caused Aphra to jump awake and Tolvan to yelp, though whether it was from the shock or feeling Aphra’s skin against hers again, she couldn’t be sure.

A dazed Aphra shook her head and propped herself up on her elbows. When her eyes landed on Tolvan, her face brightened. “Hey, Captain Snuggles – “

Tolvan punched her in the face.

Aphra hit the floor with a grunt of pain. “Jeez, I know I didn’t deserve a hug and a kiss but could you remember your hands and arms are like, _metal_?” She picked herself up and rubbed her nose, grimacing. “I feel like I was hit by a Star Destroyer.”

“I can’t exactly forget my deformities, can I? And don’t you “Captain Snuggles” me, you – you -” Tolvan struggled to find words that would do justice to the depths of Aphra’s awfulness “– lousy…self-centred…Hutt-spawn!” She winced. That was the best she, a lifelong _soldier_, could come up with? “Leaving aside what I went through before finding out you were actually alive, I’m going against orders and breaking protocol because of you!”

She sounded more outraged at this than at Aphra’s true crime against her, which despite the situation, amused Aphra no end. “Oh come on, it’s not as if it’s the first time you’ve uh, acted out of turn because of me,” she laughed. At this, Tolvan raised her fist again, looking murderous. Aphra held her hands up and said hastily, “OK, OK, I know what I did to you was terrible, and a solid punch in the mush is only a down payment on the amount of payback owed, but it really was the only thing I could think of to get us out of there.”

“It wasn’t though. I remember that your plan was to wipe your own memories. I told you to wipe yourself from mine instead.” A sudden realisation hit Tolvan then, one which simultaneously froze and boiled her insides. "Wait. You manipulated me."  
  
Aphra rolled her eyes. "Well yeah, obviously messing with your memories qualifies as -”   
  
"I'm not talking about what you had that slimy...tentacled...thing do to me," Tolvan said through gritted teeth. "I mean you acting as if you wiping your own memories was the only escape, knowing that doing so would make _me_ volunteer for it instead." She forced herself to look at Aphra, trying to fix her with a furious, challenging stare, but instead it was all she could do to keep her lips stiff and her voice even. "You…you took advantage of how I felt about you."  
  
Aphra shifted guiltily, fully aware that this was indeed what she'd anticipated when she'd brought up the Bor as a solution to their predicament. The past tense of "felt" cut deeply as well, but she wouldn't dwell on it. Yet, anyway. "Well…yeah. I did. But you didn’t give me any choice! I’d put you in the escape shuttle with Sana, and you chose to stay behind for some dumb reason! I had to do it in order to save you.”

"So you're going to tell me that making me think I was capable of killing someone I lo...cared about in a jealous rage was for my own good?" snarled Tolvan, allowing the anger to spill over, to drown out the emotions she was desperate not to feel or acknowledge. "Just like only stunning me after routing my command was for my own good, when that still wound me up in front of a firing squad? Is this how you live with using people as pawns, convincing yourself that whatever harm you do is just a different kind to the harm that would have happened anyway?”  
  
_Evil is just a measure of how much your choices take away other people’s_. _I think all that anyone can hope for ultimately, is to do right by the ones they love_. The long-ago words of Lona Aphra rang in her daughter’s head in response to Tolvan’s. But what happens when those concepts come into conflict, Mom, she thought. I took away Magna’s choices, but is it still evil if it saved her life? Wasn’t that doing right by her? Maybe life was too complicated for reductive, trite adages. Aphra shot to her feet in frustration, slamming her hand against the cell wall, unable to find a satisfactory answer to her roiling thoughts, or to bear the crushing sense of guilt that weighed on her chest like an anvil. “I told you before, Vader would have killed you too just for knowing about his secret plotting against the Emperor, and once you’d summoned him, you’d doomed both of us. So I had to come up with something that would save both of us too, and…that was it.”

“Need I remind you that I wouldn’t have known about Vader and his plot if you hadn’t deliberately endangered me by telling me about it in the first place!” hissed Tolvan furiously.  
  
"You didn’t have to call him though, did you? And this whole thing wasn't a cake walk for me either, you know, watching Vader interrogate you and silently begging him not to kill you, and listening to you going through the fake memories I implanted," Aphra snapped, her voice suddenly cracking. "And I didn’t get away footloose and fancy free afterwards. I spent days strapped to a murder droid with proximity time bombs in a mad scientist’s experiment, living in state of constant life-or-death terror – “

Tolvan barked out a singularly bitter laugh. “Kriffing hell, this is so like you, Aphra. You made me believe that I was an insane, possessive murderer for weeks, made me feel like I was going out of my mind because I couldn’t understand how I did it, because it wasn’t like me at all, and you’re making this all about YOU.”

Aphra drew in a deep breath, endeavouring to keep her composure, and her voice from rising. Why did everyone always assume the worst of her? So what if it was an assumption that was usually dead on? It still felt...unfair.  
  
"I'm _not_ making this about me, I'm trying to get you to understand that I know how awful what I did to you was, and that I paid for it. I felt I deserved all the terrible things that happened to me afterwards.” She sat down on the pallet, sighing and folding her hands together. "I feel like the scuzziest sleemo in the galaxy. I know I won’t ever have your forgiveness, sir, but I’m going to say this anyway.” She paused and looked at Tolvan, an almost…begging look in her eyes. “I love you, and I’m so sorry for what I did to you.”   
  
Despite her best efforts to remain distant and aloof, Tolvan's eyes were glistening. Blinking rapidly to keep the wetness restricted to her eyeballs, she said: "But you'd do it all over again." 

There was a long silence in which both women fought lumps rising in their throats.  
  
"Yeah, I absolutely would," admitted Aphra ruefully. "But I'd feel a million times worse about it." She looked Tolvan in the eye, a sad smile twisting her lips.

A dull ache rocked Tolvan’s heart. She knew that Aphra was, for once, being sincere. She knew that the price of obtaining that sincerity had been far too high to pay. Their relationship had always been all risk for her, with virtually no reward, and a great deal of loss. But at least she now also knew Aphra had not walked away emotionally unscathed.  
  
Resolutely ignoring the imploring look on Aphra's face, Tolvan walked to the cell door, touched her hand to the pad and stepped through it as it opened. She turned back to Aphra, avoiding her gaze. Like a coward, she thought with self-disgust. "Command will debrief you when we land," she said stiffly, in full impersonal officer or…careerist mode. Her mouth tightened. _You really need to get her out of your head, Magna_. "My orders are that you stay here until then.” She raised her blaster.

Not again, groaned Aphra inwardly, as another stun blast to the chest knocked her out cold for the second time in an hour.

* * *

Afterwards, when Magna Tolvan agreed to go along with the Rebellion's plan to exploit her ex-lover, she thought she was once again in control of her feelings. Of her motivations. She was doing it because she deserved revenge after the emotional and mental pain Chelli Aphra had put her through. Because Aphra deserved a taste of the bitter medicine she doled out as a cure for the foolishness of caring about her. It was certainly not because she believed there was nothing that garnered the avaricious archaeologist’s admiration more than being outdone in deviousness and treachery, Tolvan told herself, as she unconsciously ran a metallic finger along her electro-tattoos.


End file.
